by Stant Litore
Now Bar Cheleph looked up, and his eyes were hot with hate. For a moment Koach was sure he meant to stand and strike him. He tensed. Then there was a footstep behind him, and a new voice, a sharp voice: “Will you always trouble my sons, Bar Cheleph?”
Koach glanced up even as Bar Cheleph whirled.
Rahel stood behind him, leaning on a stick she’d plucked up from the sand, her eyes cold as winter.
Bar Cheleph’s face darkened, even as Koach felt a rush of shame. Was he so hebel that he needed his mother to protect him?
“You’ve made the fire,” Rahel said. “They need you at the nets, do they not?”
Bar Cheleph hesitated, grunted, “They do,” and got unsteadily to his feet. He gave Rahel another dark look, then slid past her and hobbled down the shore. Rahel made a small noise in her throat and seated herself on the log where the priest’s foster son had sat a moment before.
For a while they were silent. Rahel, her son looking down at the coals, and the unknown woman timidly biting at her fish. At last, his mother said, “Why do you share food with her?”
“She’s hungry.”
Rahel’s eyes were cold and keen. “And what about Bat Benayahu?”
Koach’s breath caught.
“I am your mother. Do you really think I sleep deeply enough that my son can slip out to the boats without me knowing it?”
Koach took a moment to breathe. Then said, “I meant to give her my pledge.”
“I approve. Though Benayahu might not.” Rahel turned to the silent woman. “Go. Now.”
The woman started to shrink back, but Koach caught her arm in a fierce grip. “No. Stay, please.”
“Son!”
“I offered her food and water, and that is father’s coat.”
Rahel’s lips pressed together. “That hospitality was your brother’s to give, not yours.”
Koach looked aside at the silent woman as she nibbled on that fish. The fire was warm on his back and its warmth got inside him. He wished suddenly that he could know her name. His thoughts were loud within him: I have fed her, protected her.
I provided for someone.
For a woman.
For another person. Even a boat person.
To her, to this woman, I am not hebel.
Keeping her eyes averted from Rahel—as though to show that she offered no challenge to her protector’s mother—the woman finished her fish, dropped the bones into the fire, and licked her fingers, as though years of hunger had taught her to waste not even the oils.
A shell of resolution hardened over Koach’s heart, like ice over water. He felt the wooden horse, solid and reassuring, against his side: a thing he had made, a thing that was more than just a dream of some magnificent steed that would carry him and a woman he loved far from this place. At that moment he decided he would bring the carving to Tamar. He would find some moment when the nagar was away and bring this gift to her door. He would ask her why she hadn’t come, and find his answer in her eyes.
“I am a man in our house also,” he told his mother. “Always you are protecting me, telling me when to hide within the house, when not to step outside our door. I can’t row. I can’t help with the nets or the casting. But I can carve fittings, I can cook a fish, I can do something.”
A long silence.
“You are like your father, little Koach.” There was no accusation in his mother’s voice, only sorrow. Koach glanced at her, and for just a moment, there was a woman in her face he didn’t know—not his mother, with her stern hold on the life and future of her family, with her determination and the hard steel of her love for him—but a woman vulnerable and alone, a woman who did not unclothe her heart for anyone. This woman gazed out of Rahel’s eyes for the briefest of moments, then was veiled again.
“So much like him,” Rahel said, and there was pride and grief in her voice. “More than your brother. He is more like my father.” She smiled faintly. “I wish you could have known your father. Yonah was a man who did as he pleased. But he also had two strong arms, and the love of all the fishers of Kfar Nahum.” She bit her lip slightly, as though struggling to hold back words. Then she said, simply, “She is a stranger. Be careful, my son.”
Rahel stood slowly, favoring her left hip. She glanced over Koach’s head and her eyes widened. Koach saw the glow of reflected flames in her eyes.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh, Bar Yesse, no.”
Koach looked quickly over his shoulder. He could see dark smoke roiling over the grasses of the tideline and the dull red flicker of flames in the midday sun.
One of the overturned boats was burning, one of the relics of their fathers. A gust of wind blew the dark smoke toward the town itself. Against it stood a figure in white, a torch in his hand, the air wavering around him in the heat.
Then he heard the roar of his brother’s voice, and men and women were leaping up from the cookfires and the nets with loud voices. Koach found himself on his feet, but Rahel was quicker; she was already running across the sand.
WALL OF FIRE
Burn the shelters under which the boat people took refuge, and they would have nowhere to sleep, nowhere to stay. The unclean and the heathen would have to leave. No longer would they lie like fish on the shore, like so many meals, an invitation to the dead. They might try to take shelter in the emptied, boarded-up houses of Kfar Nahum, but squatters had been driven out before.
With smoke billowing dark all about him and scratching his throat, Zebadyah strode from one boat to the next, setting fire to each in turn. One of the boat people, only one, came at him. It was a wizened man who might have been only twenty, though his face was gnarled as tree bark and his hair gone white from suffering. The man was yelling; Zebadyah thrust his improvised torch in his face, and the man stumbled back, shielding his eyes.
The others just watched the fire from either side of it, standing still as cairns, their faces gray. The sight of them—so many hungering strangers, so many lurkers about his town—chilled Zebadyah. They looked to him like the dead.
The priest had never really stopped reliving that night. Even in the light of day, he often heard and saw those dead about him, felt the clamminess of his palms and the outbreak of cold sweat on his brow. So many times he’d had to stop and stand, breathe for a few minutes, persuade himself that he stood in the cool of his synagogue, his hand still poised over the scroll of Torah. He would gaze down at the scroll and its letters and breathe, and realize that night was long past.
Now he fired another boat, roaring out a song in desert Hebrew, a song of Dawid from centuries past. Never again would he stand by as strangers swarmed into his town, leaving his people starving, dying.
“Stop!” His brother’s son was pelting up the shore toward him, a few others behind him. “These are our father’s boats!”
“Our town will not become a midden for beggars and heathen!” Zebadyah shouted. “Yonah would not want that.”
And, turning, he put another wind-bleached hull to the torch.
“No!” Shimon cried.
Yonah’s son threw himself at the priest, his hand shoving hard against Zebadyah’s shoulder, nearly knocking him to the grasses. In panic and fury, Zebadyah thrust the torch at Shimon’s face. As Shimon staggered back, his hands over his eyes, the priest heard a cry behind him. As Zebadyah turned, Yohanna his son seized the torch just above his grip.
“You,” Zebadyah gasped, the sight of his younger son like a physical pain above his heart. Shoving the pain back, he backhanded Yohanna, hard, across his face.
His son sprawled into the sand.
“Craven boy!” Zebadyah stood over him, livid. All the pain of the years tore its way out of him, making his voice savage. “You abandoned our town! You went out to live with unwashed heathen and bandits of the desert! No son of mine! No son of mine!”
While Yohanna still lay dazed, Zebadyah stepped away from the boats, out onto the sand where all could see him. He looked out at all their pale faces, his torch h
eld high, cracking and spitting. “Remember the Grief of Ezra! Remember Ezra standing at the wall! Remember. We have no wall of stone or brick to keep out the unclean, either living or dead. But by the Law of El-Shaddai, Mighty God, we will make a wall of fire.”
They stared back at him, some grim, some fearful, some bewildered. Yohanna rose slowly to his feet, a bruise already darkening his right temple.
Zebadyah’s own eyes were hard. In the silence he could hear, loud as thunder, the cracking of wood beneath the devouring fire. The crackle of his torch. The quiet, dry sound of one of the boat people weeping. The sigh of the tide and the hiss of wind in the grass. Shimon slid to his knees in the sand, his eyes still covered. He moaned in pain. Zebadyah felt a stab of regret that was then eaten away by his anger: that Yonah’s son, his brother’s son, should shelter these vagrants and eaters of flesh.
“Bar Yesse …”
He stopped.
That was her voice.
Rahel bat Eleazar’s voice.
“Bar Yesse …” She walked toward him across the shore, approaching from the cookfires. He did not answer her. He gave the next boat to the hungry flames.
She stepped past her kneeling son, her fingertips touching Shimon’s shoulder briefly. “Bar Yesse,” she called, “these boats are all that’s left of so many we’ve buried and so many we couldn’t. Bar Yesse … Zebadyah, please.”
He watched the fire lick its way up the hull.
“Please, Zebadyah,” she repeated softly.
He had never heard her say his name before.
When he faced her, her eyes held sorrow, sorrow deep as the sea, and even … empathy. For him. Looking in the eyes of this woman he’d wanted, this woman his brother had left behind, his shame deepened. The torch he held seemed suddenly repulsive and out of place.
“Zebadyah,” she said. She bit her lip. “He would not have wanted this.”
No one else on the shore spoke.
He hadn’t noticed before how much she had aged, how many lines there were about her eyes, not until this moment—but she was all the more beautiful. The wind caught her hair and blew it across her face like a dark veil, and he could not bear her beauty.
“Bat Eleazar,” he whispered.
When he spoke up, there was a note of pleading in his voice. “Everything is broken and unclean. Sons. Walls. Our whole land. Everything is broken.”
She only gazed back at him. With those eyes.
The torch fell from his fingers and the sand half-smothered its flames.
He heard Yakob step near, felt his son’s arm around his shoulders. “Come, abba,” Yakob said against the crack and roar of the flames behind them, “come, let us get some fish. There are fish roasting, abba.” His voice was soft, and Zebadyah’s shame deepened as he recognized it—it was the same tone he used with crippled Yesse, when his own father was being difficult.
Worse still was the pity in Rahel’s eyes.
“I am old, son,” Zebadyah murmured. “I’ve grown old, as the Law is old.”
He looked away from Rahel’s face, his eyes dry though his heart was full of weeping. He let his oldest son lead him down the shore. All around him, men sprang into action, as though awakened abruptly from sleep, and ran to scoop water from the sea to fight the flames, but he didn’t spare them a glance.
Shimon kept his palms pressed to his eyes, gasping for air. That had hurt. God, but that had hurt. But the sharp flecks of burning at his eyes did not hurt as much as the sound of fire eating the boats.
More than just old wood was burning.
He wanted to leap to his feet, take up a waterskin or fill his coat with sand that he could hurl over the flames to silence them. But even as he lowered his hands and blinked against the pain, he saw that it was too late. The wood burned quickly, and some of the boats already were mere piles of charred drift. He stared at them, numbly.
A hand gripped his shoulder. “Cephas,” a quiet voice said, behind him.
And the sound of that voice was like a torch touched to the dry pine of his heart. This was all Yeshua’s fault. He had come and upended everything. When had strangers ever brought good to their town? Matityahu the tax collector, who had trailed a Roman legion behind him. The swordsmen the Romans hired. The Outlaw on his dark horse. All of them had brought evil and dismay. Now there was this vagrant from the hills who brought up the quick and the dead.
“If you are of God and not a beggar or a witch, you who call up fish,” he said without turning, his voice shaking with anger, “why were you not here ten years ago, fifteen?” His words became a shout. “Why heal us only after we’re broken, feed us only after we’ve starved? Prophet or messiah, where were you then?”
The hand squeezed his shoulder. “I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer you. I can’t see the road I have to walk, the road ahead or the road behind. It is dark and it is dark …” Yeshua’s voice was thick. “The road is dark, and I don’t know what I am. Or what to tell you. I am sorry.”
The anger flowed from Shimon like water, leaving only weakness behind, and sobbing. He shook, on his knees in the sand, with the sea at his back and the boats of his People burning before him. He let the stranger hold his shoulder, and he just shook and wept. The pent-up fury and despair of fifteen years rushed through him like a school of fish with sharp teeth, chewing at him as they passed though and over him, leaving him gasping in wordless pleas against the violence of a world in which fathers sought to devour their children or in which some children were born wrong and some children starved.
“I am sorry, Cephas,” the stranger kept whispering, over and over. “I am sorry.”
Shimon might have wept there for an hour, or a month, or a year, or a year of years, for all he knew. But suddenly there were cries up by the houses of Beth Tsaida, and then shouts from the men at the nets and the fires, and the slap of running feet against the wet sand. Shimon looked away from the boats at last and saw men and women standing against the cookfires, their faces terrified.
A newcomer was running from the direction of Beth Tsaida, and he was Natan El, one of the younger fishers, only a little older than Shimon himself. The man stumbled, caught himself with one hand splayed against the sand, and got back to his feet. Then he was bolting down the shore toward them, his legs pumping. “The dead!” he cried. “The dead!”
Shimon felt all the warmth leave his body.
“It’s Benayahu!” Natan El cried. “Benayahu the nagar! I saw him running north past the midden, bleeding from his hip. He said he saw the dead! In his house! His house! In the town! He saw the dead in his house! The dead!”
EPISODE 6
KOACH’S BATTLE
Koach didn’t hesitate. He cast the last fish from the coals to the feet of the silent woman who was gazing at him with wide, terrified eyes, and he sprang to his feet. Natan El was still scrambling down the sand toward them, screaming about the dead in Benayahu’s house.
The dead.
There was shouting all along the shore, Zebadyah demanding to know what was going on, whether Natan El had actually seen the dead. Yakob was already striding north along the shore, stooping as he went to lift a large shell from the sea wrack left by the previous tide. The shell had been broken, and it had a jagged edge. “We have to find Benayahu!” he cried. Other men sprinted to catch up with him. To them it was already clear what had happened: bleeding from his hip, Benayahu had fled Kfar Nahum, fled to the hills perhaps, so that he would not be boarded up within his house for the seven days of uncleanness, while the town waited to see if he would die and then rise, moaning, to his feet.
But Koach realized something else.
The dead were in Benayahu’s house.
In Tamar’s house.
Koach cried out her name and broke into a run. The silent woman gasped as he left her by the fire. He’d forgotten her, forgotten Bar Cheleph and Bar Nahemyah, the stranger, even the great sheaves of fish, forgotten his grief beneath the boat, forgott
en everything but the way Tamar’s shoulders had trembled as her father beat her, and the hot shame in his chest as he watched and could not help. Everything but the warmth of her lips pressing his.
He ran.
Koach found the door of the nagar’s house ajar. He touched it with his fingertips, his heart pounding, and felt the grain of the wood. He pushed slightly. Its hinge was well-oiled, unlike the door to his mother’s house, and it swung open as silently as thoughts in the mind of God.
Some instinct older than speech or fire warned Koach not to call out. He slipped through the door. The atrium was empty, as was Benayahu’s room across it, but Tamar’s room was concealed by a heavy rug drawn over the entrance. The stillness of the house pressed on him, urging silence and slow movement. Hearing the roar of his own blood in his ears, Koach stepped across the atrium beneath a pale sky, leaving the door open behind him. As he neared Tamar’s room, his breath seemed loud to him, and he held his hand over his lips. He could see that room in his mind so clearly: the little heap of bedding, a bundle of clothing in the corner, a small pot, a table for an oil lamp. The shadow of Benayahu against the small light. The rise and fall of his arm. Tamar’s silent shaking, her silent tears.
He hesitated, then drew aside the rug.
The air behind it was warm and heavy with the scent of recent death. He could see her silhouette against the dim light. She stood on her bedding, with her back to Koach and her face to the boarded-up window, her hair lank and unwashed about her shoulders. Koach stood very still, his belly heaving at the smell. He clamped his jaw shut against the nausea.
Tamar was breathing, but far too slowly, as though she were asleep. He could see her shoulders rise and fall. She was holding her hands behind her at the small of her back—no, they were tied. Coarse fishing rope, the kind used for netting, wound savagely about her wrists. In the dimness, Koach could make out the dark line of it cutting into her skin.